


A Supermarket Christmas

by knit1write2togetherpsso



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: 2014 Hannibal Secret Santa, Chilton is Cuban ok, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-27
Updated: 2014-12-27
Packaged: 2018-03-03 21:48:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,291
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2889101
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/knit1write2togetherpsso/pseuds/knit1write2togetherpsso
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dr. Frederick Chilton, newly bereft of his kidney, goes to the grocery store to make the one dish from the traditional Christmas dinner that his diet allows him. Hijinks ensue.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Supermarket Christmas

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you very, VERY much to tumblr user (and older twin sister) amorphousblob, who translated the Spanish for me. This is tumblr user hannibal-cannibal-lecter's Christmas present (based on the prompt "A meets B while shopping, and awkward conversation ensues, as B is trying to avoid C") from the Hannibal Secret Santa...two days late. Mea culpa and merry Christmas!
> 
> I do not own "Hannibal," the works of Anthony Harris from which it is derived, or any of the characters herein. Any inconsistencies with canon or characterization are entirely my own and my fault.

Chilton had not been having an incredibly good year. Between the lawsuit, the disemboweling, and the subsequent investigation, he had found that any Christmas spirit he may have once had was totally vanished. It didn't help that he had canceled his annual trip to Miami for Christmas dinner due to the extent of his food restrictions. It was almost crueler than if he'd died, Chilton thought as he looked over his shopping list (written on the paper with the dietary restrictions header that his brother-in-law had given him) once more. No citrus, six servings or less of beans a week, no cheese...even if he'd felt like going to Miami and dodging aunts armed with holy water, nephews and their crowd of street urchin friends trying to get him to show off the scars, and his damn brother-in-law the nutritionist, he would have been miserable. The only thing he could have eaten at the Chilton-Gomez holiday feast was a small serving of black beans and rice and maybe some fruit salad. 

It wouldn't have been fair to anyone to show up and be the strange relative sitting in the corner hunched over the one thing they could eat while complaining vociferously about their diet. No, he was better off in Baltimore, eating a small plate of beets and beans and maybe Skyping with everyone before they went to Midnight Mass. 

He certainly wished to avoid the parade of well-wishing and insensitive questions about "so what was it like to be kidnapped and disemboweled by a patient." It had been bad enough when he was just "Tio Freddy who runs the loony bin" and had to regale every single one of his nephews' street urchin friends about the precautions he had to take with his more violent prisoners. Chilton imagined that now they would be pulling up his shirt to show off the scars, as if he were some kind of saint's body on display. He probably would have been sanctified enough with the amount of holy water Tia Magacha would be slinging around. 

His grandmother, however, felt otherwise, and had been calling him every day to complain about his decision to remain in Baltimore. These had ranged from the obvious guilt trips ("but I'm old and I don't want to think about not seeing your face one last time before I die, you never know, I could be hit by a bus") to the outrageous statements designed to inflict panic and acquiescence ("I'm going to take el guagua up to Baltimore and cook for you myself") to the low blows ("Father Luis is here, Father Luis, please tell Freddycito to come visit me"). The most recent of these calls had concluded not three minutes beforehand, and had ended up with her scolding Chilton about his accent while he yelled at her not to take the bus. "Los animales toman el autobus, Abuelita," he had yelled in the parking lot of the grocery store. "Yo trabajo en un hospital psiquiátrico y por eso tengo miedo del transporte público: es demasiado peligroso para una vieja como usted." There had been several concerned soccer moms shepherding their children away from the scary man with the cane yelling in a foreign language. 

Making it into the store had proved less of an issue after the phone call finally terminated. The parking lot was decently maintained--much better maintained than he had expected for a non-chain store--and the few hazards that there were had been easily avoided. There was a lingering sense that he was being watched, but he attributed that to the cane, or to those shoppers who had been present during his outburst. Chilton continued on into the entryway of the store, hoping that he would be able to get in and out reasonably quickly.

Wrangling a basket from the corral by the door, Chilton wondered if it were not a better idea to simply give up and eat some beets in front of the television. It would certainly be less stressful, even if it meant he'd totally failed to carry on both the family tradition of carrying on to the bitter end despite horrid consequences and the promise he'd made to himself to have at least one small thing be good about this Christmas. 

Instead, he wobbled onwards into the store, trying to locate the beans. It was a nicer grocery store than he usually went to, with numerous displays of exotic, organic, and other trendy foods at every corner. The crowning glory of this was a display of "Eggplants From Around The World" with a red eggplant in a Santa costume and a small pyramid of some very odd-looking vegetables sorted by country. He stared at it for a few moments, wondering how they had managed to find a costume small enough to fit the eggplant, before shuffling around the display and moving along. (It had been a bad idea to go to such a niche market, he thought as he nearly tripped over a stray carton someone had left. They had so much less pressure to keep things remotely accessible.)

After some meandering among the fruit stands, he finally managed to figure out where the dried beans were located. The chalkboard signs, while preserving the store's website's carefully constructed story about being a farmer's market that had enclosed itself, had been smudged significantly. This was annoying, but he felt better when he saw the varieties of beans that presented themselves. 

The recipe called for the traditional black turtle beans, and the turtle beans did have the benefit of already having their nutritional content scribbled down on the blank sections of his notepad. (This had involved a call to Marisol and listening to her husband lecture him for twenty minutes on how he needed to be more varied with his vegetable intake before finally handing him over the correct information. He had no idea why everyone in the family presumed him to be totally incapacitated after this incident. It wasn't as if he'd pulled a stunt like cousin Hector and "forgotten" that he was allergic to shellfish when he saw paella at somebody's First Communion party. He'd just...engaged in some highly dubious pyschological tactics and managed to end up with a lawsuit and some nasty scars.) However, he was temporarily entranced by the more exotic varieties. Borlotti beans, for example, would make it look very festive with their candy-cane stripes. 

Unable to decide, he got half a serving of each and carefully wrote the name, amount, and unit price on the paper bag in case the cashier wanted to try and ring him up for a can of kidney beans instead. (Or whatever attempts at stealing you could do at a retail store like this. Perhaps claiming that they weren't actually organic and were therefore more expensive.) This left him with the challenge of finding rice. Although the store had also boasted that it had more varieties of everything than "traditional" stores, a quick examination of the actual grains aisle had proven that they interpreted "everything" as "fits the trendy diet of the week." There was only one small bin of bomba rice, and the price per ounce made Chilton surreptitiously cross himself. It went into the basket as well.

Things seemed to be going exactly as planned, and as a reward, Chilton decided to explore around the building for a few minutes. He made the circuit of the vegetables of the world, and was leisurely poking at one of the more luridly colored eggplants when that sensation of being watched reared its head again. There weren't very many people in the store, and he thought that he was being overdramatic for a moment until he noticed a familiar figure by the crate of ginger roots. There was only one person he knew who spent a good deal of time frequenting out-of-the-way small groceries, and of course it was Hannibal. He had no particular desire to engage with him at all today, and especially not to discuss how limited his new diet was. Or his shortcomings as a psychologist. Or whatever else Hannibal had up his French cuffs for him today.

Thankfully, the other psychologist seemed to be elbow-deep in...some kind of plant. Before he could be noticed--or at least before Hannibal bothered to let Chilton know that he knew he was there--Chilton moved as quickly as he could in the opposite direction. The beans and rice rattled in their little bags as he did so, and for a moment, he had an absurd thought that Hannibal could track him by the sound of dried legumes. Clearly the stress of the holidays were getting to him if he was able to hold such thoughts while awake and sober. If his mental map of the store was correct, he could cut across the bread aisle to the left, then make a sharp turn at the dairy stand, and find the cash register that was both nearest to the door and farthest from the corner Hannibal was currently occupying.

Unfortunately for Chilton, he was not so fortunate as to make a successful break towards the cash register. While attempting to blindly cross the bread aisle, there was a horrendous crash. He had, in his infinite good fortune, been knocked over by a cart. And not just any cart, no. The person behind it was none other than Freddie Lounds. It was almost as if the gods themselves had decided to make him suffer today. 

"I'm sorry, I didn't see you there," she said as Chilton pulled himself up using a shelf. 

"No kidding," he spat. 

It occurred to him that this probably wasn't the best way to respond to someone who had helped to keep him alive, even if he was probably going to have a nasty set of bruises tomorrow. "I'm sorry," he said, dusting off his sleeve. "That was uncalled for."

"Why were you even going so fast?" she asked. "It's an indie grocery store, not a race. Do you think you're on a cooking show?"

He really had no idea how to respond to this question. "I'm trying to avoid my colleague because I do not feel like being told just how inadequate I am while he pretends to be nice" seemed a little odd. Then again, she had also breathed for him for a longer period than he really cared to dwell on (and still woke up at night dreaming about). There really were no more boundaries anymore in that sort of situation, or if there were, they certainly hadn't been discussed by Miss Manners or by Abuela's colonial social mores. 

"I saw Dr. Lecter and was trying to avoid him. I imagine he's heard all this racket by now." Freddie, to her credit, did not look confused or ask him why he felt the need to run through the store to accomplish this. 

"You could put your basket in my cart," she said as she pushed aside an avocado and a container of silken tofu. "It might be a bit easier to move around then. I'm honestly surprised that you were even able to get this far into the store, considering how much of a minefield it is normally." 

"You shop here regularly?" Chilton had not considered the possibility that Freddie Lounds was a human being behind her blogging habits and may actually have had such needs as eating and running errands. Or even the chance that she was a fairly strict vegetarian; he was under the impression that blogging types tended to live off unhealthy diets. It was a shock comparable to going to the grocery store one weekend when he qwas six years old and seeing Sor Juana in line at the deli counter.

"It's got better produce. The owner also pays for ad space, and his boyfriend's a cop, so he's able to tip me off sometimes." The sense of being a schoolboy and running into his teacher at the grocery store vanished somewhat at this revelation. He wasn't sure why he had expected slightly higher mores against bribery on her part; she was, after all, an upjumped tabloid author.

She continued moving slowly along the aisle. "I couldn't come in here for six weeks after I broke my ankle during an investigation. I tried walking around with the crutches, but it was just a disaster waiting to happen. Wound up having to send some of the interns to do the shopping, and they made a total mess of that. I didn't think you'd be using a cane at this point, though?"

"I'm not yet back to full strength on this side," Chilton said. "I can walk without it for shorter periods of time now. The weather hasn't really been helping much--if I slip and fall on the ice, I've been told I could damage my organs even further and possibly kill myself. My brother-in-law and my mother are both very insistent upon my doing everything "right" at this point in time." 

"You lost a kidney, it's not like you lost a leg."

He did not much like the way this conversation was going. "Are you doing anything for Christmas?" he asked, wondering how his life had devolved to the point that he could actually make small talk with the person who had manned the ventilator while his patient had disemboweled him. 

"Not really," she said, poking doubtfully at a loaf of bread. "There's the Tattler office party, but that doesn't really count. I'll probably do the same thing that I do every holiday--find seasonally appropriate murders. When I was in the cancer department, I'd do the same thing. Pumpkin spice turns back lymphoma. Secret ingredient in this fruitcake helps to prevent cancer before it even starts. That kind of thing. Even better if you toss in some references to holy snake oil from the manger or something like that. If they're that desperate..." 

Chilton was not entirely sure how to progress with this conversation. "I was supposed to go to Miami," he said, "but then that incident at the planetarium happened. And now instead of eating roast pork and listening to my grandmother complain at how Caribbean my accent's getting, I get to eat beets."

Freddie looked at him with some confusion. "What accent?" She was, at least, tactful enough not to say "but you don't look Hispanic."

"My Spanish accent. She's Cuban, my whole mother's side of the family is either straight off the island or Cubans raised in Miami, so I've been speaking practically my whole life. We'd do the whole traditional Cuban meal at her house on Christmas Eve before we went to Midnight Mass, and then we'd come back and open presents. She'd roast an entire pig in the backyard and, last Christmas, there were two card tables devoted to buñuelos alone. Of course, I can't have any of that stuff anymore."

She had the grace to look guilty. For a moment, Chilton felt as though he'd kicked a puppy. It wasn't her fault that she'd been kidnapped and forced to assist Gideon.

"I thought that you didn't have as bad organ damage as you could have, considering the circumstances," Freddie said as they wheeled (and limped) into an aisle filled with various crunchy granola beauty and hygiene products. "Why all the self-denial? You were never the type before."

"My brother-in-law's a nutritionist and every single one of my relatives has issues with their blood pressure. My sister's aren't diet-related, but it's not exactly a great precedent, especially with my newly fragile health. It was pretty much decided for me that I had to follow the most restrictive low-sodium diet possible. The only thing that I can eat from the traditional menu is a very small serving of rice and beans. Hence my shopping expedition. And my home-made notepad."

"It's a very nice one," she said. "I was going to ask where you ordered it." There was another awkward lull, punctuated by the squeak of wheels as they moved forward. Chilton took the time to look through the gaps in the shelving; no plaid suits or annoying colleagues to be seen.

"I didn't know they sold hair products here," he said as she unloaded at least half the shelf into her cart. Some of them he was able to recognize--the shampoo, for example, was the same one Marisol had in her bathroom--but others were totally foreign. "Is there a special, or do they always have this stuff?"

"They're the only ones who sell the kind of hair products I can actually use without my scalp turning into a slaughterhouse. Do you think naturally curly hair like this is maintenance-free?" Freddie scowled at one of the bottles and put it back, rummaging in the back of the shelf for a few minutes until she found another that was more to her liking. "You have no idea how hard it is to avoid turning myself into that little girl from the cartoons."

"Little Orphan Annie? If Little Orphan Annie grew up and started poking around crime scenes instead of blowing Daddy Warbucks' fortune on eye surgery?"

"No, the one from Charlie Brown who's always going on about her 'naturally curly hair'," she said, rolling her eyes. "Unfortunately for me, 'But I have naturally curly hair' doesn't get me out of being threatened with criminal charges."

They continued on through the aisles in a pattern that was close enough to Chilton's original plan that he didn't feel the need to inconspicuously prod Freddie into turning different corners. There were plenty of left turns, and although he saw a few men of Hannibal's build with similar blondish brown shading to salt-and-pepper hair, none of them were wearing plaid suits and looking as though they had a bone or three to pick with them. The dairy stand was fast approaching, and with it, the shining promise of fleeing the grocery and driving off into the winter sunset with his bag of beans.

Surprisingly enough, for a vegetarian store, the dairy stand happened to stock eggs and--a little farther down--some fish. "I thought vegetarians weren't supposed to have eggs?" Chilton asked. "Unless these are really convincing egg substitutes?"

"You're thinking of vegans. There are vegetarians who eat eggs and drink milk. And some who eat fish. Personally, I can't stand fish and eggs, but it's no skin off my nose if someone needs to eat them." She opened the case and took out a container of soy milk. "This kind tastes better, anyways."

There were also more varieties of vegetarian-friendly coffee creamer than Chilton had supposed. Freddie gravitated towards one labeled with a family of dancing candy canes and, without looking even the slightest bit concerned at the sheer amount of coffee creamer she was taking, plonked an entire crate into the bottom of the cart. 

"I run through a lot," she said. "My line of work involves far too many late nights to let me get by without caffeine of some kind, and I'm allergic to tea."

"I have a cousin who's allergic to shrimp," Chilton said. "He's kind of stupid to begin with, but he nearly died because he went to Red Lobster and 'forgot' that he couldn't have lobster or crab, either." The dead fish by the dairy case stared up at them reproachfully from their bed of ice.

"How do you forget something like that?"

"He did it once before with the paella at someone's First Communion, but this time I think he just got tired of me talking about how good it was, and how sorry I felt that he wasn't able to crack open a nice lobster claw and slather it with butter. So he goes to the Red Lobster with his epi-pen and winds up in the hospital for a week until his airways go back to normal size. His mother still blames me for it, but I think his allergist ought to send me a Christmas card every year or something. After all, I'm keeping him in business."

"I can see where you get your reckless streak," she said.

"He ate a lot of paint chips," Chilton said. "And it's not recklessness, it's being over-ambitious. Which is very slightly different."

Freddie shook her head and continued on, Chilton trotting along beside her. They had finally reached the check-out lane nearest the door. Chilton craned his neck and stood on his tiptoes as much as he was able; not a hint of plaid suit and Lithuanian-Italian aristocratic superciliousness was to be found. The very air of the store seemed lighter, as if a cloud had finally been blown away by the breeze from the dying sun. "I do believe our mutual friend's moved on," he said cheerfully, "and now I'll be off."

"So then why have you been walking through the store with me all this time? You didn't need to spend an extra forty-five minutes chatting about food allergies and coffee creamer." Freddie didn't look surprised; he had forgotten that beneath the mass of red curls and the fondness for criminal trespass that she was actually a fairly good judge of character and, considering her career, was very well-motivated to have a good read of people she encountered.

"At the beginning, yes," he said as he removed the basket from her cart. "But the pleasure of your company was too good to pass up. I'd almost be friends with you if it wasn't so hard to get over the whole organ removal thing." 

"That is a setback," she replied neutrally. As soon as Chilton was a decent distance away from her cart, Freddie began to move towards one of the other lanes. "Merry Christmas, Dr. Chilton," she called over her shoulder. 

"Merry Christmas, Ms. Lounds," he said, waving half-heartedly while the boy at the checkout lane tapped his foot impatiently. 

As he shouldered his bag and walked out to the car, Chilton felt vaguely lonely. The small parking lot showed no sign of Freddie Lounds, and for a moment, he almost felt sad that she wasn't there to talk with as he carefully put the groceries on the passenger seat. He sincerely hoped that he wasn't becoming infatuated with her; the odd naming issue aside, it seemed somehow wrong to be romantically involved with someone who had breathed for him. And he was certain Abuelita would have a fit--she and Tia Magacha had even stopped buying their traditional weekly copy of the Tattler when they found out Freddie Lounds had been involved in his accident; what in the world would she do if he brought her over for Thanksgiving as his girlfriend? (If she even was interested in men, let alone a mostly intact specimen like himself. Maybe the height difference would be insurmountable.)

Christmas Eve at Chilton's house was not as somber an affair as he'd thought it would be. Skyping with his relatives had gone fairly well, though Tía Magacha had been about to douse the computer with holy water until Marisol's eldest had moved her away. The rice and beans hadn't been as delicious as he had wanted it to be, but it hadn't felt like so much of a punishment. All that was left was to do the dishes and...he wasn't quite sure what he would be doing after that. Going for a walk was risking a cracked skull.

Suddenly, the doorbell rang. 

Chilton clambered to his feet and shuffled towards the door. It was after seven on Christmas Eve, and he'd managed to convince his grandmother not to take "el guagua" to Baltimore. (He probably owed Marisol quite a bit for that one.) He couldn't think of anyone who could possibly be calling at this hour. 

When he opened the door, Freddie Lounds was standing there, holding a covered plate. "I thought you might be lonely," she said. Her coat and hat were flung onto the coat rack without a second thought, and after kicking off her boots (a minor feat, considering how high her heels were), she sat next to Chilton on the couch. 

"Here you go," she said. "It's all fruit and I think there may be a popcorn ball, but it didn't look like it was covered in salt and butter, so I thought it would be ok." 

"I...um...I wrote you a card," Chilton said, handing her the envelope that he had left on the coffee table for a week instead of putting in the mail like a normal person.

"Your handwriting's atrocious," she said as she read the card. "I thought you said you went to Catholic school?"

"I am a medical doctor. But I've been trying to write with the opposite hand since I've been using the cane. It feels foolish to have to constantly put down the cane to sign off on forms and charts and contracts when I still have two perfectly good hands." He took a munch from the popcorn ball. "This is pretty good."

"Thank you. Judy from Subscriptions made them. I'd have brought you some of the punch, but it has booze in it, and I didn't want to make you black out or anything." She fiddled with the gilted edge on the outer part of the card. "It's a very nice card."

"I still have some rice and beans, and I think that It's A Wonderful Life is still on, if you want to watch that?"

"Are they made with animal fat? And I can't believe you'd rather watch "Merry Christmas, you old Savings and Loan" instead of something a little less earnest. Even Ernest Saves Christmas or the Star Wars Christmas Special is better than that claptrap..."


End file.
